Page 164 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Embedd ng Journal sts: How Close Is Too Close? | 1

the war. In the case of U.S. coverage, a concerted effort was made to avoid viewer
empathy for wounded Iraqis through various verbal and visual strategies. In the
rare case the wounded Iraqis were shown on American TV, the images were
identified as propaganda for Saddam Hussein. Dead and wounded American
soldiers were also rarely seen.

ConCLusion

Embedded reporting, precisely because it provides such newsworthy reports,
forces the coverage towards a simplistic narrative in which wider questions
about the war are excluded. Indeed, it could be argued that to the degree that
embeds succeeded in providing objective, exciting, relatively uncensored British
reports, such reporting made the story of war more compelling. This explains
the Pentagon’s enthusiasm for the program. In short, if the details did not always
go their way, the thrust of the coverage was very much on their terms.
Both in Britain and the United States, the historical significance of the role of
embedding was in constructing a narrative confined to the progress of the war.
Telling an exciting, real-time, visually stimulating narrative of conflict forced
the wider questions about the war to the background, and made the moment of
victory, rather than, for example, the long-term welfare of the Iraqi people, the
climax of the narrative. Even when British embedded reporters were demon-
strably impartial, it was within the confines of a limited perspective—a focus on
the progress of the fighting rather than why the war was being fought or what
its consequences might be. Without that discussion, the media did not fulfill
their role in a democratic system, to provide the public with the information it
needed to understand the national security policies, and the long-term effects of
military actions taken by its government.
see also Alternative Media in the United States; Anonymous Sources, Leaks,
and National Security; Bias and Objectivity; Journalists in Peril; Narrative Power
and Media Influence; Nationalism and the Media; Paparazzi and Photographic
Ethics; Parachute Journalism; Presidential Stagecraft and Militainment; Propa-
ganda Model; Reality Television; Sensationalism, Fear Mongering and Tabloid
Media.

Further reading: Andersen, Robin. A Century of Media, A Century of War. New York: Peter
Lang. 2006; Bennett, W. Lance. News: The Politics of Illusion., 6th ed. New York: Pearson,
2005; Center for Constitutional Rights. Federal Lawsuit, US District Court: Southern
District of New York, January 1991; Hedges, Chris. War Is a Force That Gives Us Mean-
ing. New York: Anchor Books, 2002; Knightly, Phillip. The First Casualty: The War Cor-
respondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Kosovo. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2002; Lewis, Justin, Rod Brookes, Nick Mosdell, and Terry
Threadgold. Shoot First and Ask Questions Later: Media Coverage of the War in Iraq.
New York: Peter Lang, 2006; MacArthur, John. The Second Front: Censorship and Propa-
ganda in the Gulf War. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Robin Andersen and Justin Lewis